Determining risk factors for a disease can be helpful in managing a disease, and for assessing an individual's overall risk for a disease and in creating a plan to modify an individual's risk of developing a disease. Medical providers are under increasing pressure from governments, medical specialty organizations, managed care, and patients to practice preventative medicine. Similarly, health organizations and insurance companies are beginning to recognize that risk analysis of disease and preventative medicine can be a cost effective strategy for providing care. Medical screening and prevention guidelines for many chronic disorders have been developed by governmental and medical organizations to facilitate risk analysis of disease and preventive medicine practice. However, such guidelines can be slow to be adopted, sometimes poorly understood, counter to historical practice, and can be perceived as cumbersome, difficult to use, not readily accessible, or confusing by both medical providers and patients. Similarly, the guidelines do not incorporate comprehensive personalized family health history information to determine a patient-specific or personalized risk of disease and disease prevention plan. Accordingly, there remains a need to better assess disease risk and communicate risk to patients. In addition, clinical trials and epidemiologic investigations of risk factors for disease often fail to adequately assess the family history as a risk factor, often using limited definitions of family history. Improved assessment of familial risk in these investigations could help in elucidating the role of family history as a disease risk factor, and the potential role of genes in the development or natural history of disease.